W10M User Reviews and Impressions!

[odin09]

I am on my third install of windows 10. First time was months ago and the phone looked horrible and was pretty much unusable. Second try was a little better but my cellular data wouldn't work. Now on my third try I couldn't be happier. Windows 10 looks great and works smooth. Battery life is the same mediocre life from wp 8.1. My only negative is that I miss the true unified inbox from 8.1. The inbox looks nice but I still want to see all of my email in one place without having to go through menus.

 

[dor1an ceta]

i have build 10536.1004 and its working just fine

 

[svtfmook]

installed 10536.1004 on my lumia 735, everything worked perfectly, almost.
everything was smooth, battery seemed fine. verizon visual voicemail did not work, which i cannot live without. camera crashed once.

recovered to stock firmware because i didn't want to accidentally find a major issue when i wasn't at home.

 

[tommybrrr]

On a 930 the 10536 is too unstable and Outlook Mail + Calendar are unstable as well. So as a business phone for daily usage it needs more work and some missing features from 8.1, like specific VPN options...

 

[Blackhivemedia]

The preview builds running on my aging 920 wasn't a fun experience. Long loading, blank screens, broken apps (mail, calendar, etc). I look forward to seeing the final build on a phone made for it. It sure is sleek looking.

 

[Byrese]

Using the 10549 build as DD. Runs almost perfect. I had to downgrade to 8.1 to get it. While there i was quickly reminded how much better W10M is even in preview. Night and day. Worth the few bugs. The UI is gorgeous

 

[Koen C]

Same here, after the announcement of gapless playback for Groove Music I couldn't resist any longer. Really pleased with the performance of my Lumia 640 with the 10549 build. Close to perfection.

 

[Black3ternity]

I just used my old Lumia 920 after the announcement of the 10572 Build and decided to give it a kick because I don't want to use my Lumia 1020 (daily driver) as a test again. I did that way back then and it was horrendous. Wasn't crashing and unstable as hell. Now I got it and I am really really impressed with it. Works good. Except the little bug here and there that something crashes or the lockscreen stays a few seconds before showing the start screen.
I really like the speech keyboard - works perfectly. I set my language and speech settings to US for Cortana and a german keyboard. And the german keyboard works flawless with speech recognition. Really really nice.
Other than that, I'm testing skype messaging (again) and it reminds me of the old functionality of the messaging-hub in WP8. Really missed that and I wish stuff like Telegram / Whatsapp could also be integrated into there.... Didn't test SIM functionalities for now but I think I will plug my SIM in there in a few days to test it as a daily driver.
I tested the preview now in anticipation for the 950 XL and to see if the OS is really "as horrible as everybody says" and "stuffed with hamburger menus" and "no more windows, just an Android copy". I have to say - Hamburgers are a bit strange to get used to. But there is no information in there that would be hellish. I have no bigfoot-hands so I can't reach it properly one handed (right handed guy) but there is no information that required me to do so. Yes - the pivot and slide is mostly gone. A bit sad, but it is okay - UI seems pretty nice. Especially when I compare it side by side with my 1020 which runs WP8.1
Thumbs up from me. It can only get better - and I think the 1GB RAM of the 920 make it a bit rough for the insider preview but it's fine.
Can't wait for the 950 XL to kick it up a notch.


Kind regards,

 

[elindalyne]

So I just started using it yesterday on a new 640 I purchased for the sole purpose of testing Windows 10 mobile and here are my first impressions...

It feels like a downgrade compared to Windows 8.1 or at least not an upgrade.

Glance feels like it's been neutered and no Linked Inboxes is terrible. We lost a ton of customization options in regards to email and that is really killer.



Also it doesn't really feel like anything is "new". I get it that we're going for software as a service and that new features will be delivered more reguarly, but as it stands if feels like the only truly new thing Windows 10 gets you is is skype messaging.

I will say the experience is very similar to Windows 10 desktop, so mission accomplished there.

Did I miss anything new?

 

[HoosierDaddy]

So I just started using it yesterday on a new 640 I purchased for the sole purpose of testing Windows 10 mobile and here are my first impressions...

It feels like a downgrade compared to Windows 8.1 or at least not an upgrade.

Glance feels like it's been neutered and no Linked Inboxes is terrible. We lost a ton of customization options in regards to email and that is really killer.

Also it doesn't really feel like anything is "new". I get it that we're going for software as a service and that new features will be delivered more reguarly, but as it stands if feels like the only truly new thing Windows 10 gets you is is skype messaging.

I will say the experience is very similar to Windows 10 desktop, so mission accomplished there.

Did I miss anything new?

I think what you missed is that you are comparing a beta WM10 to a production WP8.1.

And maybe that if you think desktop Windows 10 isn't better than Desktop Windows 8.1 you are in the minority.

 

[elindalyne]

I think what you missed is that you are comparing a beta WM10 to a production WP8.1.

And maybe that if you think desktop Windows 10 isn't better than Desktop Windows 8.1 you are in the minority.

What I meant was the user experience of W10 desktop feels similar to W10 mobile - Settings, UI, etc... That's a good thing. W10 desktop is far better than 8.1.

And I understand that W10 mobile is beta software, but you shouldn't get rid of a key feature that has been around since WP 7.5. The idea is to add to the operating system, not feel like you're taking away from it. They have absolutely done a lot of under the hood improvements and made great strides to improve the UI, but the fact of the matter is there are things you cannot do in W10 mobile that you can do in WP7.5+.

For what it's worth, I think they've made W10M better as a phone OS as a whole, but they're going to run into issues when there are key features (email customization) that just aren't there.

 

[buddy007]

My experience with Windows 10 mobile and opinions

Hello all. I am an owner of a lumia 525 with a jacked up USB which cant be detected on PC due to a science project I did on my windows phone that messed the port. I've been actively following all the development of the win 10m on WC and other sites. Finally I couldn't resist and tried it on my mom's lumia 520. I could've done it on my phone but I cant roll back due to my messed up port.
Lets start. I enrolled my mom's phone to windows insider program, opted for fast ring and started my journey to build 10581. I am going to detail my exact experiences and their respective opinions. The build started downloading in the phone update area. I left the phone as it was and had a bath meanwhile. When I came back it was showing me an error of some sort related to server issue. Nevertheless I tried it once more and this time too I left my phone on the table side only to discover that the same error popped up again. So the third time I change my screen time out setting to 5 min and prevented the phone from locking by touching the screen occasionally. Finally it downloaded and started installation. This is somewhat discouraging as I had to try three times for the build to get downloaded onto my phone. And I had to prevent it from getting locked to avoid an error. Weird.
My mom's phone had around 1.35 GB of free internal storage before the start of the download. The installation started and after sometime it showed me and error that my free internal storage was not sufficient for installation. I know many of you have advised upgrading to win 10 after doing a hard reset but I wanted to see how things would go if I did a normal upgrade as would in any common upgrade situation. Then I uninstalled WhatsApp as it was consuming around 700 MB of internal memory and moved some other apps to SD card. I now had around 2.2GB of free internal memory. I then started the whole process again. It finally installed this time and proceeded the spinning gears stage. It look a long time to finish only to present me with a sad smiley face :-( MY PHONE BRICKED ON MY FIRST DIRECT ATTEMPT TO UPGRADE TO WIN 10M.
Now I was really glad I didn't do it on my lumia 525 as at that point I would have to restore using the device recovery tool.
I used the windows device recovery tool and flashed it to windows phone 8.1 lumia cyan. Then did the update to denim and then did the whole process again. This time finally windows 10 mobile greeted me.
Now lets talk windows 10. I tried messing around all the features and let me tell you the experience was bad. Almost everything took forever to load and store app was the worst of all. It frequently stuck as some initial downloads were going on at the start. I waited for them to clear out. My mom is a government employee and she needs to deal with data on excel sheets and mails, and WhatsApp. I immediately installed WhatsApp and the restore function worked flawlessly. Then I proceeded to setup gmail account. She received a couple of mails with excel attachments which failed to open the excel mobile which was showing an error "Microsoft excel cant open this workbook due to : some older graphical objects". My mum was furious and anxious with me as she had a teleconference coming and she needed the data. I quickly opened the thing on my desktop. Now after a while the excel opened but the screen estate for viewing on lumia 520 was extremely small. I can only zoom out the data but not the headings. In windows phone 8.1 the entire thing is zoomable. Now this alone was a deal breaker for my mom.
Lets talk the other worst app. Cortana. The app was very slow to start up and the animations were like 0.1x and extremely laggy. Very disappointing experience coming from windows phone 8.1 where Cortana is awesome. I liked the new keyboard very much. When I switched off Cortana, the search replacement was pathetic. The bing search which pops up if you disable Cortana in 8.1 is 1000x better than this. This area desperately needs improvement.
The animations are smoother in transitions across OS but multitasking was very bad. 512 MB RAM to blame here but instead of the resuming screen the screens stay blank for a long time. I liked the start screen. I've become a big fan of the 100% transparent feature. Notification center was also decent, no stuttering or anything. File explorer was really good and a big improvement over windows phone 8.1 .
Lets talk Microsoft edge now. The features and everything were good a but web pages seem to load a bit slower than internet explorer. But the scrolling was smooth. searching for contacts from phone app is also missing, I meant searching through names. Messaging +skype were good but as with all other apps , it has high loading times.
And the biggest blot on the build is that it constantly froze. I had to soft reset the phone like 7 times in the day. Mail was good. Groove was alright but nothing great in performance.
Finally after the 8th or 9th freeze my mom got fed up and asked me to roll back to 8.1 . I rolled the phone back to 8.1 after giving some feedback.
At the end of all this, my overall impression of windows 10 mobile didn't feel substantially different from windows phone 8.1 . Settings page should've been done right from windows phone 8.1 . Performance is horrible on the older snapdragon s4 processor. 512MB RAM didn't help in multitasking either. Overall I don't think RTM should happen so soon. The performance is still not optimized for low end hardware. And if this is the final case I advise people to stay on windows phone 8.1 if you are using x20 series lumias.

 

[Maurizio Troso]

I'm using on my daily 520 with smoothing and satifaction. Only one main iussue found (messages app crash phone on exit)

 

[glossywhite]

Why are you "reviewing" Beta builds? As if theses "reviews" will even hold any weight once that particular build has expired.

Wow.

 

[nailzer]

Why are you "reviewing" Beta builds? As if theses "reviews" will even hold any weight once that particular build has expired.

Wow.

Funny you say that ....... looking at all your posts complaining of this, that and the other :grin:

 

[Tullphan]

I've been pondering getting into the insider program as I have a Lumia Icon and a 1520.3.
I think my main concern is losing the camera...well at least the Lumia camera program.
Right now i'm really worried about the Windows Mobile program and am thinking of selling both my Lumia phones.

 

[Maurizio Troso]

I've been pondering getting into the insider program as I have a Lumia Icon and a 1520.3.
I think my main concern is losing the camera...well at least the Lumia camera program.
Right now i'm really worried about the Windows Mobile program and am thinking of selling both my Lumia phones.

Naaaaaa, the new Windows Camera is better and updates itself one a week till now

 

[Tullphan]

I'm curious as to how many 1520 owners are enjoying the new build or not.

 

[The19thD0CT0R]

Losing Faith because of the Little Things

Ugh. I don't care about the app gap. Yet. I don't care about market share, etc. I've been a staunch supporter of MS, W10, everything. I subscribe to Groove and 365. Have an XOne. I love having everything similar across them all. But lately I've been getting annoyed due to failures in small things that seem insignificant, but to me really show incompetence. And as I only have two payments left on my Icon and HAD been planning to go to AT&T for a 950, now I'm often looking at that gorgeous, huge Nexus and wondering how to get it to work with my PC and Xbox if I went that route. It's so tempting.

First off, what the hell Cortana. Three days in a row now, you have told me I had an appointment coming up that I rescheduled or cancelled DAYS ago. This....is unacceptable. MS likes to say, oh it's like having your own personal assistant. I would have fired her days ago. When I change something on my Calendar, Cortana should pick up on that immediately. It should be among her most basic things. I moved something back a month, three days ago, and today she is telling me it is tomorrow. Open the event, and it is for next month like I rescheduled. That is BULL**** and makes Cortana look very amateurish. And MS by extension. Didn't do that on 8.1 "beta". Does now. Pathetic.

Also pathetic? MSN weather, the live tile. That's nice that you're telling me the temp in Carlsbad where I live; too bad I've been in Oceanside the past SIX HOURS. Tile still says Carlsbad. Oh, I have to open the app to get it to update? Totally defeats the purpose, and sometimes (usually) that doesn't work either. Oh, but Accuweather? Their tile does it just fine. More bull****.

Edge syncing. Sometimes works, more often it doesn't. Or very, very slow to sync. Not reliable at all.

These seem like small things, but to me...they are indicitave of deeper problems. I don't need more apps and so on; I just want the most BASIC of **** to work reliably, and they can't even get that right. And I'm not buying that crap about "always evolving". This isn't new features, or minor bug fixes, these are fundamental parts of what they are supposed to do that have been their since the beginning and continue to not work. And I'm tired of it. I want to stay with MS and and W10 mobile, but it's getting hard. And has nothing to do with the app gap. I just want THEIR apps to work. And they don't.

PS: this site is SO riddled with scripts and background ad garbage it took me 15 minutes to write this because my typing kept getting interrupted. Terrible.

 

[Ten Four]

Re: Losing Faith because of the Little Things

First, use Adblock Plus with Firefox to block all the crap websites throw up to block your reading pleasure. Hint to advertisers: as a matter of principal I will not click or read any advertising that blocks what I want to read. You are wasting your ad dollars on producing this garbage. Produce tasteful static ads with good content, and I might consider reading them.

Second, I will agree that the non-updating live tiles are rather frustrating. None of the MSN ones reliably update: weather, sports, news. IE crashes frequently, and some websites never load properly in the first place. To give MS some credit, none of the other browsers I've tried are as good. I have yet to find a browser for Windows Phone that just works as it should. I haven't noticed any major problems with calendar syncing, but Cortana sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. I took a major trip recently and when it worked to announce upcoming flight information it was great, but it didn't do it half the time. The old reliable print out with scribbled notes worked much better. I'm beginning to think that featureitis (cramming more and more features into an operating system) is gradually eroding the usefulness of phones just like it has for things like word processing, email, and PCs in general. Keep it simple and do what you do really, really well. That's where Apple in general leads the pack--they don't necessarily create something at the cutting edge, but what they do is make the experience really good for what there is (in general).